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The antithesis of human dignity could be humiliation. Many persons with psychiatric illness experience numerous humiliating situations in our lives. Being physically restrained, being forcibly medicated, being put in a courtroom in handcuffs, and, upon a semblance of recovery, being put in a minimum-wage, brainless job, with a job coach to tell you how to sweep a floor, are humiliating scenarios to which mentally ill people are subject. 

This adversely affects dignity. I am a grown man in my fifties, yet in the recent past, when I've needed family help to pay for car repairs, my mother in her eighties would show up at the car repair venue to pay for the job. This is a humiliating experience. It subjects me to the chuckles of managers of car repair places. Not so when I was young. 

In my late teens and early twenties when I worked, I paid for my own car repairs usually with my checkbook, sometimes with a credit card. This created a deep contrast in how self-esteem is affected. Additionally, having a job that is not within the help or the domain of the mental health treatment system, a job in which we are competing successfully among neuro-typical coworkers, does wonders for the dignity and self-esteem. 

A while back, I don't know if you remember this news piece, George Takei (formerly of Star Trek) called Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas "A clown in blackface." This is an attack on the dignity of Justice Thomas, but it is doubtful it affected the judge's dignity. Thomas believes dignity is transcendent of the circumstances in which we are living. He believes human dignity is "innate." (The interchange emerged because of the Supreme Court ruling that allows same sex marriage. Justice Thomas voted against.) 

Human beings are much more vulnerable than this. Dignity can be shattered when we are subject to too much humiliation in our lives. The human soul can be shattered--it is not immune to all things. The mental health treatment systems are full of "clients" who have surrendered their dignity and who live for some pizza, ice cream, cigarettes, and marijuana, or an extra dosage of benzos hidden in the dresser. 

It is when mentally ill people continue to have dignity despite having a psychiatric condition that we come under scrutiny and we invoke hard-knuckle, sometimes covert tactics of individuals who run the system, who consider us troublemakers and want to knock us down. And I've been knocked down a number of times. 

How people are treated in outpatient institutionalization seems to presume a lack of dignity. This is not extreme, but it is clearly noticeable. It doesn't compare with how Black people were treated during slavery and in recent history. And it doesn't compare with how the Jews were treated in NAZI Germany. Yet as persons with mental illness, we are presumed to be of below average intelligence. And it is obvious that we are presumed to be living in adult bodies but to have the mentalities of children. A flyer for a mental health event seemed to try to lure us in by offering free refreshments "...and punch." We were expected to flock to an event so that we could get a taste of the fruit punch. 

A poster on a wall of a mental health treatment building had a picture of a teddy bear in clown garb. The caption was "I just want to be taken seriously." I have seen similar posters to that. These are attacks on our dignity. The outpatient mental health treatment system believes that we should not have a sense of dignity. When we try to feel that we have it, we are therapeutically invalidated and mocked. 

Psychotherapists are expert in the realm of talk, and in the realm of writing clinical notes to prove anything that falls within an objective. However, many of them do not handle this power toward the well-being and express needs of their clients. Other objectives exist. 

The mental health treatment system in the view of its architects, should run like a well-oiled machine that eliminates all avenues of consumers bettering our circumstances and that eliminates sources of dignity. Mental health "clients" are considered inconvenient people, and the purpose of the system is to keep us neutralized and keep us from interfering with the lives of the good working people. If we attain dignity, it is the first step toward building better lives. This is not the objective of the architects of the treatment systems. The purpose of mental health treatment is to keep us managed, and to prevent us from becoming nuisances. 

Yet, we need to take advantage of any help that is offered. It is a choice between accepting some amount of help while at the same time occasionally looking over our shoulders, versus trying to buck everything; the latter simply will not work. The need to treat a psychiatric illness is real, regardless of how paranoid we are about the treatment systems. The systems offer treatment. We must accept that treatment. The alternative is not something you want. 

If you are suspicious of the motives of caregivers, be suspicious, and your approach ideally should be to keep them honest rather than attempting to go against them. They can be made to offer us real help. We just need to be persistent.